. . . has its own website now, by the way. There's a nice trailer for the film right there on the home page.

I've been excited about this film for the couple of years I've been seeing segments of it at the Liberty Film Festival (which is here in L.A. every fall, courtesy of the folks who created the Libertas blog, Jason Apuzzo and Govindini Murty).

Meanwhile, On the Fence Films is promoting not just Indoctrinate U, but some of their other offerings. A few of these—Dead Meat, in particular—shine the spotlight on how care is rationed under the Canadian healthcare system. I've been thinking that any of these might be good companion pieces to Michael Moore's Sicko. (Yes: I have a standing offer with my lefty friends to watch any of the documentaries they want me to see—as long as I can also show the DVD of my choice on the same night. What I will not do is rent one of Moore's movies myself, thereby putting money in his pocket.)

On the Fence, by the way, now has a blog on its home page.

Documentaries may or may not be fine art (I think they are) but I really feel that center-right filmmaking is about to tackle narrative movies, and in fact that there is a sort of renaissance brewing among classical liberals who are bored with the far-left stances of many writers, producers, filmmakers, painters, sculptors, and performance artists.

It isn't as if art were incompatible with Western Civilization, so it's no surprise that there's more interest in creating art among those who defend its values, now that some of the traditional gatekeepers have been taken off-duty.

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. . . debates Iowahawk on how The View might become watchable. I wouldn't know, since I've never watched that show. (Of course, I don't even watch good television, so what the fuck do I know?)

Two of the funniest guys in the blogosphere, in one post!

Missing: Ace. But one cannot have everything. At least, that's what they tell me.

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See this little nugget on Britain's NHS.

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Canadians are taking issue with Michael Moore's latest faux-documentary:

At a news conference, Canadian journalists harangued Moore for, as Toronto Star film critic Peter Howell wrote, making "it seem as if Canada's socialized medicine is flawless and that Canadians are satisfied with the status quo." Apparently taken aback by the assault from the Canadian journalists, Moore said, "You Canadians! You used to be so funny! ... You gave us all our best comedians. When did you turn so dark?"

And Insty remarks:

I don't know, maybe three years on a waiting list for hemorrhoid surgery will do that to you . . . .

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If we were to frame Kazan’s testimony to HUAC in terms of personal loyalty, what about his responsibility to, say, Vsevolod Meyerhold? When Kazan joined the Group straight out of Yale, the company looked to the Russians for inspiration, not just to Stanislavski but also to his wayward disciple Meyerhold. The latter was a great mentor to the young American and other Group members. This was a period, remember, when the Group frequently visited Russia – Lefty, for example, was staged in Moscow. Meyerhold loved the older stylized forms – commedia del’arte, pantomime – and refused to confine himself to Socialist Realism. So Stalin had him arrested and executed.

Think about that: murdered over a difference of opinion about a directing style. As “persecution” goes, that’s a little more thorough than forcing some screenwriter to work on a schlock network variety show under a false name.

Amid the herd-like moral poseurs, Kazan was always temperamentally an outsider, and his work benefited after he became one in a more formal sense. But, both before and after, his best productions concern themselves with a common question: the point at which you’re obliged to break with your own – your union, your class, your group, or, in Kazan’s case, your Group. The 1947 Oscar-winner Gentleman’s Agreement strikes most contemporary observers as very tame, square Kazan. But, in a curious way, that’s the point. When you start watching and you realize it’s an issue movie “about” anti-semitism, you expect it to get ugly, to show us Jew-bashing in the schoolyard, and vile language about kikes. But it stays up the genteel end with dinner party embarrassments, restricted resort hotels, an understanding about the sort of person one sells one’s property to. Dorothy McGuire and her Connecticut friends aren’t bad people, but in their world, as much as on Johnny Friendly’s waterfront, people conform: they turn a blind eye to the Jew-disparaging joke, they discreetly avoid confronting the truth about the hotel’s admission policies, and, as Gregory Peck comes to understand, they’re the respectable face of what at the sharp end means pogroms and genocide.

That’s what all those Hollywood and Broadway Communists did. They were the polite front of an ideology that led to mass murder, and they expected Kazan to honour their gentleman’s agreement. In those polite house parties Gregory Peck goes to, it’s rather boorish and tedious to become too exercised about anti-semitism. And likewise, at gatherings in the arts, it’s boorish and tedious to become too exercised about Communism – no matter how many faraway, foreign, unglamorous people it kills. Elia Kazan was on the right side of history. His enemies line up with the apologists for thugs and tyrants. Whose reputation would you bet on in the long run?

That would have to be in the awfully long run. Read the whole thing.

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